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Department of Physics525 Northwestern Avenue
West Lafayette, IN
47907-2036
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Telephone:
(765) 494-2970
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(765) 494-0706
Nick Bigelow
University of Rochester
"Spinning a Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensate"
Thursday November 08, 2012
4:00pm 203
Refreshments are served at 3:30 p.m. in Physics room 242
The spinor Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a degenerate, dilute quantum gas in which the spin state of the atoms provide added degrees of freedom that can be manipulated and studied. The BEC is also a superfluid in which angular momentum is quantized, giving rise, for example, to quantized vortex states similar to the flux vortices in a superconductor. In this talk I will review the physics of the spinor BEC and describe how light beams carrying orbital angular momentum can be used to create novel topological vortex excitations that connect BEC physics to several other areas fields.